Sorcery, Wheels, and

Mirror Punishment in the

Apocalypse of Peter

CALLIE CALLON

The Apocalypse of Peter depicts a scene where the punitive fate of sinners
in the afterlife is described with great specificity. The Apoc. Petr. asserts that
each sinner will be divinely punished “according to his works,” and much
recent scholarship on the work has attempted to demonstrate that the major-
ity of these punishments correspond logically with the sins that prompted
them. However, the curious depiction of the sin of sorcery being paired with
the punishment of sorcerers being bound to a revolving wheel has posed a
problem for scholars, for this seems to defy the pattern of intelligible cor-
respondence between a sin and its subsequent punishment. In this article I
will propose a solution to this seeming incongruity. Using the model of mirror
punishment as how the author envisioned “according to his work” as func-
tioning, along with an examination of implements considered to have been
used in magic in antiquity, I suggest that a logical correspondence between this
sin and its punishment becomes intelligible.

The Apocalypse of Peter1 contains a vivid scene in which Jesus gives the
disciples a view of the afterlife, including a designated place of punish-
ment for sinners. Here adulterers are hung from their loins, blasphemers
by their tongues, and those who bore false witness have their lips cut off.

I am grateful to the two anonymous readers for JECS, whose insightful comments
substantially improved this article. I am also especially indebted to John Kloppenborg,
whose assistance and encouragement in this endeavour (and far too many others to
list!) has been indispensable. All shortcomings of the work are, of course, entirely
my responsibility.
1. Here it must be stipulated that the text referred to above as the Apocalypse of
Peter refers to the Ethiopic recension, the priority of which over the Greek Akhim
fragment (first argued by M. R. James, “A New Text of the Apocalypse of Peter,”

Journal of Early Christian Studies 18:1, 29–49 © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press
30    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Recent scholarship on the Apoc. Petr. seeks to interpret the majority of

the punishments depicted as corresponding in an intelligible way to the
sins that prompted them. Although there are various understandings of the
specific logic operating behind the author’s presentation, the bulk of these
punishment and crime pairings appear to correspond logically: as divine
judgment for each sinner “according to his work” (1 [Schneemelcher 626];
6 “offense” [Schneemelcher 628]; 13 “deed” [Schneemelcher 633]).2 How-
ever, one of the pairings which has seemed to defy this pattern (although
admittedly not the only one) is the sin of sorcery and the punishment of
its practitioners. The Apoc. Petr. 12 (Schneemelcher 632–33) describes
“wheels of fire, and men and women hung thereon by the power of their
whirling. . . . Now these are the sorcerers and sorceresses.” No one has
yet proposed a satisfactory explanation for the depicted correlation
between wheels and sorcery. This (and admittedly other curious pair-
ings) has subsequently posed problems for scholars seeking to identify
the way in which the logic of “according to his works” is envisioned by
the author. I will propose that the optimal model for understanding the
author’s logic is the concept of mirror punishment. This model provides
a solution to the seeming logical disparity between the pairing of the sin
of sorcery with punishment via a wheel, and it lends further support to
previous connections that scholarship has made between sins and their
corresponding punishments.

THE LOGIC EXHIBITED IN THE CORRELATION

OF A SIN AND ITS DEPICTED PUNISHMENT

David Fiensy argues that the best model for understanding the logic
behind the pairing of a given sin with its subsequent punishment is what

JTS 12 [1910–11]: 36–54) is generally accepted. See C. Detlef G. Müller, 623–24 in

New Testament Apocrypha Vol. II, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, trans. R. McL. Wil-
son; rev. ed. (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co Ltd; Louisville, KY: Westminster John
Knox Press, 1991); Dennis D. Buchholz, Your Eyes Will be Opened: A Study of the
Greek (Ethiopic) Apocalypse of Peter, SBLDS 97 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988),
413–24; Richard Bauckham, The Fate of The Dead: Studies on the Jewish and Chris-
tian Apocalypses (Leiden/Boston/Köln: Brill, 1998), 162–65. All of the above hold
that the extant Ethiopic text (a copy from the ninth century) can confidently be held
to be a close representation of the mid-second-century Greek text. The text discussed
here is also distinct from the third-century Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter, which seems
to bear no literary connection to the text examined above.
2. Unless otherwise noted, all translations come from Schneemelcher, New Testa-
ment Apocrypha.
 CALLON / MIRROR PUNISHMENT    31

he describes as the “Jewish notion of the lex talionis.”3 He suggests that

the logic behind this principle, best exhibited in Exodus 21.23–254 but
also operating in Second Temple Judean texts, is that the “punishment fits
the crime, like repays like.”5 He cites as examples of illustrations of this
principle the fate of Cain in Jubilees 4.31–32,6 as well as the fate of Jason
in 2 Macc 5.9–10.7 Yet, as Patrick Gray rightly suggests (although still
adopting the lex talionis as his own understanding of the text’s logic) its
presence in the Apoc. Petr. would be “striking and, perhaps, surprising in
light of the author’s almost certain knowledge and use of Matthew, where
Jesus abrogates the Old Testament lex talionis.”8 As Lautaro Lanzillotta
notes, the lex talionis (even if historically related to notions of vengeance)
was “directed at regulating an unmeasured application of retaliation.”9
As such, its aim was to prevent a punishment that would go beyond
what was suited to the crime in terms of punitive severity. This is clearly
the understanding to which Matthew subscribed, for in chapters 5–7 he
depicts Jesus as going even further with the aim of curtailing excessive
retaliation, thus bolstering—not abrogating—the lex talionis. This con-
cept of curtailing retribution cannot be operating in the Apoc. Petr., for
numerous references in the text describe the torment of sinners in hell as
unrelenting or ceaseless. This can only be deemed excessive punishment
for acts which could only have occurred episodically. For example, slaves
who have disobeyed their masters (presumably by talking back to them,

3. Fiensy, “Lex Talionis in the Apocalypse of Peter,” HTR 76 (1983): 255–58;

here 256.
4. An “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for
burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” Unless otherwise noted, all biblical trans-
lations are from the NRSV.
5. Fiensy, “Lex Talionis,” 256.
6. Where “Cain was killed . . . for his house fell upon him and he died in the
midst of his house, and he was killed by stones; for with a stone he had killed Abel,
and by a stone he was killed in righteous judgment” (ed. and trans. R. H. Charles,
The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, Vol. II (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1913; repr. 1968), 19.
7. “He who had driven many from their own country into exile died in exile.”
8. Patrick Gray, “Abortion, Infanticide, and the Social Rhetoric of the Apocalypse
of Peter,” JECS 9 (2001): 313–37; here 318. The dependence on and expansion of
Matthew by the author of the Apoc. Petr. in numerous respects has been amply
demonstrated. See, for example, Bauckham, Fate of the Dead, 173, who suggests
that Matthew’s gospel is indeed the only written one employed by the author of the
Apoc. Petr.
9. Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta, “Does Punishment Reward the Righteous? The Justice
Pattern Underlying the Apocalypse of Peter,” in The Apocalypse of Peter, ed. Jan N.
Bremmer and Istvan Czachesz (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 144 n. 37, my emphasis.
32    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

as Bauckham suggests),10 an action which cannot have been of continuous

duration, are described as “men and women who ceaselessly chew their
tongues and are tormented with eternal fire” (11 [Schneemelcher 632]; my
emphasis). Moreover, such torture cannot be seen as a measured response
to an act which could not possibly have inflicted equitable physical harm.
One would perhaps be hard-pressed to find a clearer example of dispro-
portionate punitive measures for the deed which prompted it.11 Clearly,
then, the lex talionis as understood by members of the early Jesus move-
ment is not the logical framework adhered to in ascribing punishments
for sins in the Apoc. Petr.
Dennis Buchholz offers an understanding of the author’s logic that not
only better accounts for the relationship between the sin and punishment
pairings, but also better accords with the Apoc. Petr.’s main (identifiable)
source: the Gospel of Matthew. He argues that the operating principle is
that “the punishment of each one must correspond in kind to his vice”
or what will here be termed as one category of mirror punishment, and
he cites Wis 11.16: “one is punished by the very things by which one
sins.”12 As such, this form of logical correspondence eliminates the need
for a measured response which is at the heart of the lex talionis and the
way in which members of the early Jesus movement understood it. Here
all that is required is that the means or instrument by which the person
has sinned is the means by which God ultimately punishes them.13 In the

10. Bauckham, Fate of the Dead, 218.

11. Although the text does assert that those who the elect pray for and ask to be
remitted from punishment will be released and able to join the elect in paradise (Rainer
Fragment, 14). Nonetheless this clearly cannot apply to all of those in hell, as then it
would undermine the presumable exhortatory purpose of composing the Apoc. Petr.
Moreover, although Buchholz, Your Eyes Will Be Opened, 150–51, 348–50, 385–86,
suggests that references to the eternity of punishment may have been added later to
the text by the author of the Pseudo-Clementines, this does not negate the other dis-
crepancy between a sin and its punishment.
12. Buchholz, Your Eyes Will Be Opened, 276. Similarly, Bauckham, Fate of the
Dead, 214, notes this connection: “the instrument of sin should bet the instrument
of punishment,” understanding it as another form of the principle of the lex talionis.
As examples Bauckham cites Wis 11.16 (noting that here because the Egyptians wor-
shipped animals they were punished by a plague of animals), and like Fiensy (“Lex
Talionis,” 256) Jubilees 4.32. Bauckham, Fate of the Dead, 214, concludes that he
does not know of this form of this principle being applied to judgments after death,
thus suggesting that he does not consider the Apoc. Petr. to be employing it.
13. Such a view finds perhaps its best parallel with Martha Himmelfarb’s “measure
for measure” punishment in Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Chris-
tian Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). Himmelfarb,
Tours of Hell, 87–89, provides a thorough table of Judean and early Christian apoca-
lypses which describes the punishment of the limb with which the sin was committed,
 CALLON / MIRROR PUNISHMENT    33

Apoc. Petr. “according to his work” denotes the author’s subscription to

the principle of mirror punishment.14
As Ka Leung Wong suggests, “While ‘mirror punishments’ are rightly
distinguished from the actual talion . . . it is also justified to describe these
punishments as having talionic features or [being] talionic in nature,” refer-
ring to mirror punishment as “the broadened sense of the lex talionis.”15
Wong identifies three types of punishment which comprise the category
of mirror punishment: (1) the “punishment of a bodily part which is used
directly in the offense”; (2) the “punishment by the same means which the
offender used in the crime”; (3) “punishment determined according to the
motivating force which forms the basis of the crime.”16 To these charac-
teristics can be added the symbolism that constitutes a prominent feature
of mirror punishment. Like Wong and Bauckham, Patrick D. Miller sees
a relation between the talio and mirror punishments, arguing that the lat-
ter is an expression of the former “symbolically.”17 He notes that in mir-
ror punishments “the punishment takes on a heightened sense of irony
and poetic justice.”18 Alexander Rofé also highlights what he considers
the symbolic nature of mirror punishment as well as its close relation to
the talio, referring to “that which we designated as mirror punishment,
the symbolic talio.”19
Thus mirror punishment is perhaps best understood as an expansion of
the lex talionis, a more inclusive model for punitive retribution: not only
does punishment extend from the bodily appendage to the external instru-
ment one used in committing the sin, but so too it allows for the presence

such as hanging by the tongue in cases of gossip, slander, or blasphemy. With mirror
punishment this differs only in that this principle gets extended beyond the bodily
appendages of a person to include external devices used to commit the crime.
14. Lanzillotta, “The Justice Pattern,” 144 n. 38, also holds that mirror punish-
ment is the schema operating in the text. He stresses that “the talio therefore should
not be confused with the so-called ‘mirror punishments.’” Although Lanzillotta holds
that mirror punishment is the author’s model for describing punishments, he does
not offer an examination of how the principle is operating behind crimes and the
corresponding punishments in the Apoc. Petr. (naturally, as this is not the focus of
his work). Therefore such an undertaking (pursued above) may prove to be a fruit-
ful contribution.
15. Ka Leung Wong, The Idea of Retribution in the Book of Ezekiel (Leiden: Brill,
2001), 227–28.
16. Wong, Idea of Retribution, 227.
17. Sin and Judgment in the Prophets: A Stylistic and Theological Analysis, SBLMS
27 (Salem, MA: Scholars Press, 1982), 104.
18. Miller, Sin and Judgment, 110.
19. Deuteronomy: Issues and Interpretation (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2001),
187, my emphasis.
34    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

of symbolism in the punishments. Moreover, it is a better understanding

of the logic in the Apoc. Petr. as it eliminates the need for punishments to
be measured in response (which is the purpose of the talio), and as such
does not require an abrupt departure of the understanding of the talio
from the Apoc. Petr.’s source, Matthew.20 Taking mirror punishment as
the key to the Apoc. Petr.’s pairings of a given sin with a given punish-
ment not only clarifies the relationship between sorcery and wheels, but
also strengthens previous scholarship on other pairings.

THE PROBLEM OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE

SIN OF SORCERY AND THE PUNISHMENT OF THE WHEEL

In most cases we can readily understand how the punishments described

in the Apoc. Petr. logically correspond to the sin that prompted them.
For example, punishment inflicted on the tongue in response to verbal
sins (Apoc. Petr. 11: slaves who talk back; Apoc. Petr. 7: those who have
blasphemed) is a common trope in early apocalypses, and the correlation
between the means of sin and the means of punishment is clear.21 The
same can be said for the punishment of adultery.22 Others, while not as
common in contemporaneous literature, are still understandable in terms

20. Indeed the Apoc. Petr. seems to have adopted Matthew’s implicit distinction
between the lex talionis’s applicability for human interactions, and the divine judg-
ment of God. For while Matthew’s Jesus advocates the cessation of retribution in
human actions, he also has no hesitation in foretelling the punitive fate that awaits
those who purportedly deserve it. In other words, for Matthew the principle of the
lex talionis is applicable only to human interaction; God appears to have great deal
more latitude in meting out punishment. Matthew 16.27 describes the eschatologi-
cal judgment: Jesus asserts that “the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in
the glory of his father, and will then he will repay everyone according to his deed”
(κατὰ τὴν πρᾶξιν αὐτοῦ; my trans.). At the close of his eschatological discourse (Matt
25.41), Jesus speaks of those who failed to provide for others and asserts that the
Son of Man will respond to them harshly, remarking that he will say to them “you
that are accursed depart from me into the eternal fire (τὸ πῦρ τὸ αἰώνιον) prepared
for the devil and his angels” (my trans.). Jesus concludes the discourse (Matt 25.46;
cf. 18.8) with the assertion that “these will go away into eternal punishment (εἰς
κόλασιν αἰώνιον), but the righteous into eternal life” (my trans.). Here, then, God is
depicted as meting out eternal punitive measures for temporal human deeds—hardly
the measured response that the lex talionis advocates.
21. See Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell, 87.
22. Where adulterous women are hung by their hair and described as those “who
plaited their hair, not to create beauty, but to turn to fornication” (7 [Schneemelcher,
629]) and adulterous men are hung by their thighs (7) which, as Buchholz, Your Eyes
Will Be Opened, 314, notes, was commonly used as a euphemism for male reproduc-
tive organs. For parallels see Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell, 87.
 CALLON / MIRROR PUNISHMENT    35

of logical correlation.23 Indeed, even those which are at first glance not
readily intelligible on this principle can be revealed to be so with further
investigation, as scholarship has shown.24 One of these pairings which
has seemingly defied this correlation, however, is that of the sorcerers and
sorceresses who are punished with the wheel of fire.
David Fiensy confesses that “admittedly, not all of the punishments
correspond logically to a particular vice.”25 He cites as two examples of
this phenomenon women who have not kept their virginity until given in
marriage, who are punished by having their flesh torn (11),26 as well as
the sorcerers tormented on wheels of fire.27 For the latter he proposes an
unsatisfactory solution: “It is possible that where there is no logical cor-
respondence, the punishment has come from the Orphic tradition and
has simply been clumsily attached to a vice by a Jewish redactor . . . the
reference to sorcerers and wheels of fire are reminiscent of a scene in the
underworld in Ovid’s Metamorphosis where the mythical Ixion is chained
to an ever-turning wheel.”28 Similarly, Bauckham suggests that logical cor-
respondences may not be discernable in all of the punishments, stating that
“perhaps the authors of the traditions [crime and punishment schema] and
the author of the Apoc. Petr. itself were simply unable to devise measure-
for-measure punishments for every sin they wished to include,” count-
ing the sorcerers among this group of seeming unexplainables.29 He also

23. For example, Buchholz, Your Eyes Will Be Opened, 319, notes the symbolic
connection of between one portion of the punishment for exposing one’s children:
those who have exposed their children are forced to stand naked, listening to the
recrimination of their deceased children at Apoc. Petr. 8.
24. See n. 26 below.
25. Fiensy, “Lex Talionis,” 257.
26. Which Baukham, Fate of the Dead, 217, later offers a logical correlation for:
“The idea of the flesh dissolving may be borrowed from the punishment of the adul-
terous wife in Numbers 5.27 (‘her thigh shall fall away’). In that case, the ‘flesh’ of
the young women is a euphemism for their sexual parts, and it is that part of their
body which sinned that is punished.” Similarly, but without such a specific allusion
in mind, is the idea of this torn flesh functioning as a euphemism for a torn hymen.
Ann Ellis Hanson argues persuasively against the view that the connection between
virginity and an intact hymen was not made in antiquity (advocated in particular by
Giulia Sissa). Rather, Hanson, “The Medical Writer’s Woman,” in The Construction
of the Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David M. Halperin, John J.
Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 329,
argues that the notion of the intact hymen as a seal of virginity was a popular one,
as evidenced by Soranus’s arguments against its existence, speaking of this “dividing
membrane of popular imagination.”
27. Fiensy, “Lex Talionis,” 257.
28. Fiensy, “Lex Talionis,” 257.
29. Bauckham, Fate of the Dead, 218.
36    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

­ entions Ixion as a potential model for the author of the Apocalypse,

m
seemingly having no qualms with the fact that on this view what he deems
the “representative punishment” of Ixion30 “is the only one which appears
in the Apoc. Petr.”31 Thus, Bauckham also seems to envision the some-
what haphazard insertion of this reference that Fiensy suggests. Buchholz,
although he provides exegesis aimed at identifying the logical correlations
between almost all of the crime and punishment pairings in hell, is notably
silent on the topic of sorcerers and their punishment.32
None of these solutions are satisfactory as they require us to suppose
that the author inexplicably succumbed to a sole instance of relying on
representative punishment which is incongruent with the author’s own
repeated statement that each will be punished according to his work. This
principle necessitates a logically corresponding punishment to fit the sins
depicted. Moreover, as the authors discussed above seem to realize them-
selves, despite the tentative offering of Ixion as the author’s model, this
connection simply does not logically correspond to the stated sin of prac-
ticing magic.33 As Christopher A. Faraone notes, although scholars since
the late 1800s have argued that Ixion is punished in this manner in order
to suit his crime—that he tried to seduce Hera by spinning an iunx-wheel—
nowhere in Greek literature is there any hint that Ixion employed magic
(erotic or otherwise) against Hera.34 Thus far scholars have tried to make

30. Similar to Sisyphus, Tityos, Tantalus, and others, in that they were viewed as
merely generic punishments that a sinner could expect in the Greek underworld. As
such, “representative punishments” have no logical or symbolic correspondence to a
particular unethical act (Bauckham, Fate of the Dead, 219).
31. Bauckham, Fate of the Dead, 219.
32. Buchholz, Your Eyes Will Be Opened, 337, merely offers that section 12 “seems
to combine punishments inflicted on every sinner with those suffered by a particular
category of sinner, the magicians. This combination causes some ambiguity, but the
section is well written and not fragmentary or corrupt.” He proceeds to describe what
he envisions as physically occurring, but does not attempt an explanation of the logic
of grouping this particular sin with this particular punishment.
33. Moreover, while Ixion is bound to his wheel in chains, the sorcerers are bound
to their wheels by “centrifugal force” (12; Buchholz’s free translation, Your Eyes Will
Be Opened, 225). If the author of the Apoc. Petr. was making reference to Ixion, it
seems probable that he would not stipulate that it is the force of the spinning—rather
than chains—which keeps the sorcerers bound to their wheels.
34. Faraone, “The Wheel, the Whip and Other Implements of Torture: Erotic
Magic in Pindar Pythian 4.213–19,” CJ 89 (1993): 1–19; here 12. Indeed, Faraone,
“The Wheel, the Whip,” 12 n. 40, suggests that the entire concept of poetic justice
in Greek works, that the forms of punishment in the underworld are specifically
designed for particular crimes, is suspect. He further notes (12 n. 41) that the only
allusions to Ixion in magical texts are references to him as a famous example of a
 CALLON / MIRROR PUNISHMENT    37

fit a punishment that does not seem to logically correspond to its sin; this
attempt stands at odds with the dominant pattern and asserted concern of
the text: that sinners will be punished according to their deeds.
Although it may be rash to rule out Ixion with absolute certainty,35 a
much closer parallel between magic and wheels can be found in other
texts from antiquity: the role of both fire36 and a wheel in what were
­considered (either universally or by members of the early Jesus movement)
to be magical practices.

torture victim, not as one who employs magic. Similarly, William Hansen, Ariadne’s
Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature (New York:
Cornell University Press, 2001), 72, notes the seemingly unrelated nature of much of
the punishments in the afterworld in Greek literature. He remarks that “the Greeks
imagined crimes for which these fruitless activities [such as Sisyphus and Oknos]
might be thought fitting punishments, but the purported offenses vary and the casual
constructions are unconvincing.” Although the sixth-century b.c.e. writer Pherekydes
suggests that Hades forced Sisyphus to roll a stone up a hill in order that he might
not run away again, this is “a connection that makes no sense at all.” This, then, not
only supports the view that Greek myths were unlikely to be a source for the author
of the Apoc. Petr. (given that they offer no logical correspondences between crimes
and punishments as the Apoc. Petr. often evinces) but this also evidences a desire in
subsequent writers to forge this connection in their source. As such, it is unlikely that
the author of the Apoc. Petr., presumably with creative control over his own work
and repeated assertions of punishments “according to his work” would be satisfied
with a somewhat randomly selected punishment.
35. On this point I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer from the JECS who
read an earlier draft of the present work.
36. However, the fiery aspect of the wheel (and indeed the presence of fire in other
punishments) will not be addressed, given that fire is so prevalent in the Apoc. Petr.’s
tour of hell. As Bauckham, Fate of the Dead, 220, notes, it appears in fourteen of
the twenty-one punishments described.” Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell, 110, remarks
that “in the New Testament the concept of a fiery hell has been firmly established.”
In Matthew in particular there are numerous references: 5.22: “liable to the hell of
fire” (ἔνοχος ἔσται εἰς τὴν γέενναν τοῦ πυρός); 18.8: “thrown into the eternal fire”
(βληθῆναι εἰς τὸ πῦρ τὸ αἰώνιον); 18.9: “thrown into the hell of fire” (βληθῆναι εἰς τὴν
γέεναν τοῦ πυρός). Given this, it seems most likely that the author of the Apoc. Petr.
included copious amounts of fire in his descriptions with the primary aim of creating
­verisimilitude with contemporaneous expectations of what would be found in hell
rather than a specific punishment which would logically correspond to a particular
crime. Often fire seems to be merely an added touch to a particular punishment,
designed to heighten the punitive effect. Nonetheless, for the prevalent use of fire in
magic, both literal and metaphorical, see Eugene Tavenner, “The Use of Fire in Greek
and Roman Love Magic,” in Studies in Honor of Frederick W. Shipley, ed. George
R. Throop (St Louis, MO: Washington University Press, 1942).
38    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

THE WHEEL IN DEPICTIONS OF MAGIC IN ANTIQUITY

As Georg Luck notes, the iunx or iynx (ἴυγξ) originally referred to a type
of bird (the wryneck), which for magical purposes was tied or nailed onto
a wooden wheel.37 However, later the wheel itself (with no bird attached)
could also be called an iunx,38 and was often depicted on Greek vases.39
Citing A. S. F. Gow, who had a model of such a wheel reconstructed, Luck
describes the motion of the wheel in a way that corresponds well with the
depiction of the sorcerers being bound to wheels “by the power of their
whirling” (Apoc. Petr. 12 [Schneemelcher 632]). This wheel has holes
on both sides of the center; a cord is passed through one hole and back
through the other, and if the loop on one side of the instrument is held
in one hand and the other in the other hand “and the tension alternately
increased and relaxed, the twisting and untwisting of the cords will cause
the instrument to revolve rapidly, first in one direction and then in the
other.”40 Luck refutes Gow’s suggestion that the use of such a device passed
out of use in later magical practices, a suggestion based on the observa-
tion that the iunx is never mentioned in the magical papyri and that there
is no clear equivalent to it later Roman literature.41 Rather, Luck asserts
that the opposite is true, evidenced in its later employment by the theur-
gists and in artistic depictions on Apulien vases.
As Daniel Ogden notes,42 there has been considerable debate on whether
the iunx wheel was the equivalent of the rhombos,43 or whether these were
two distinct wheel-like devices used in what could be considered magical
practices. He notes, most importantly for our purposes, that although mod-

37. Luck, “Theurgy and Forms of Worship in Neo-Platonism,” in Religion, Sci-

ence, and Magic: In Concert and Conflict, ed. Jacob Neusner (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1992), 201.
38. As could a magical spell itself. The LSJ offers as one definitions of the ἴυγξ as
simply a metaphor for “spell, charm.” The following will focus only on instances of
the word where it is clear that an actual wheel-like instrument is depicted.
39. Luck, “Theurgy,” 201.
40. Luck, “Theurgy,” 201.
41. Luck, “Theurgy,” 201.
42. Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds
(Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 240.
43. The ῥόμβος, which the LSJ offers as one definition: “magic wheel, spun alter-
nately in each direction by the tension of two cords passed through two holes in it,
used as a love charm,” citing Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans 4.5, the Antholo-
gia Graeca 5.204, and Theocritus’s Idylls 2.17 as examples, which will be addressed
above. Moreover, it equates the term with the Latin rhombus, citing as further
examples Sextus Propertius 2.28.35 and Ovid’s Amores 1.8.7 (which will also be
discussed above).
 CALLON / MIRROR PUNISHMENT    39

ern scholarship argues for a distinction between the two,44 many ancient
sources seem to take the two terms as synonymous.45 As Sarah Iles John-
ston notes, Roman poets frequently mention instruments used in magic
which were whirled or spun, usually referred to as rhombi, and she suggests
that “perhaps the Romans, for whatever reasons, did not adopt the Greek
word for the wheel and simply used what became a generic word for any
whirling magical tool that made noise: ‘rhombus.’”46 The consideration of
noise is peripheral to the present study,47 but her suggestion that the terms
were viewed as synonymous and that they were further equated with the
Latin turbo finds additional support in the fifth-century commentary on
Horace, Epodes 17.7 (which I will discuss further below). Here the com-
mentator Pseudo-Acro remarks, “The turbo [‘wheel’] is an instrument of
evil sorcery [maleficium]. By its whirling people are compelled into love,
by a certain craft. It is called iunx in Greek. By turbo he means rhuthmos
[Greek], which the Greeks call a rhombos.”48
Thus, as Ogden suggests, “this ancient scholar evidently considered
iunx and rhombos to be one and the same.”49 Johnston notes that “it
seems that Roman poets also used the term [rhombus] to refer to the iynx-
wheel. When Propertius says, for example, staminea rhombi ducitur ille
rota, it is easier to picture the iynx than a bull-roarer.”50 Regarding the
term turbo, Gow notes that the ancient commentator Servius translates

44. For in-depth discussion on the topic, see A. S. F. Gow, “ΙΥΓΞ, ΡΟΜΒΟΣ,
Rhombus, Turbo,” JHS 54 (1934): 1–13, and Eugene Tavenner, “Iynx and Rhom-
bus,” TAPA 64 (1933): 109–27.
45. Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts, 240.
46. Sarah Iles Johnston, “The Song of the Iynx: Magic and Rhetoric in Pythian 4,”
TAPA 125 (1995): 177–20, here 181 n. 7. Here she is employing the identification of
the rhombus with a bullroarer as postulated by Gow, “ΙΥΓΞ,” 6.
47. Johnston argues that the perceived power of the iynx (either the bird or the
wheel) resided not in physical motions (such as the spinning of the wheel or the turn-
ing of the bird’s neck), but in the sound that was subsequently produced. While such
an argument is vulnerable against the numerous references in ancient texts where
the spinning or whirling motion of a magical wheel is stipulated yet which offer no
comment on any subsequent sound, such a view does not undermine the claim here
that the whirling motion of the wheel is closely related to references to what might
be considered magic in antiquity. For, in any case, in order to produce sound from
these circular objects they must first be spun. Indeed, as Gow, “ΙΥΓΞ,” 9, suggests of
even the bullroarer, “If swung fast enough, [it] really looks like a wheel.”
48. As quoted by Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts, 241.
49. Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts, 241.
50. “He is controlled by the threaded magic wheel” (3.6.26), in The Complete
Elegies of Sextus Propertius, trans. Vincent Katz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2004), 249; Johnston, “The Song of the Iynx,” 181 n. 7.
40    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Theocritus’s iunx as turbo.51 Eugene Tavenner thus seems correct when he

suggests that “the Roman poets in fact use the words rhombus and turbo
interchangeably, both words being as a rule translated as magic wheel by
English commentators.”52
The modern debate as to whether these terms denoted the same object
need not be resolved here. It is sufficient that these terms denote something
that was used in what could be considered magic, was spun or revolved
in a circular manner, and corresponds to what we would term a “wheel.”
Although the most prevalent type of magic in which the wheel appears
is what might be termed “erotic magic,” the use of the wheel was by no
means confined to this genre. References to a wheel appear in depictions
of other types of rites where the object that was sought to be manipulated
is not a love interest (as Martial, Epig. 9.29 and Marinus, Life of Proclus
28, make clear).53 Perhaps it is more accurate to speak of magic that seeks
to compel its object to conform to the will of the practitioner, and this is
the terminology that I employ below.
Regardless of which wheel in particular is envisioned, the connection
between wheels and what was depicted or denounced as magic finds
widespread expression in contemporaneous literary texts and perhaps
in the magical papyri. A papyrus spell for attracting a woman implies
the usage of a wheel even if it does not mention one explicitly: “Just as
into your chorus amid the stars A man unwilling you attracted to your
bed for intercourse, and once he was attracted, he at once began to turn
Great BARZA, nor did he cease turning, and While moving in his circuits,
he’s aroused: wherefore attract her to me. . . .”54 The earliest example of
the connection between the wheel and magic designed to compel can be
found in Pindar’s Pythian Odes. Here Jason receives the iunx along with

51. At 8.21; Gow, “ΙΥΓΞ,” 9.

52. Tavenner, “Iynx and Rhombus,” 112.
53. For this point I am again indebted to an anonymous reviewer from the
JECS.
54. PGM 4.2934–37 in The Greek Magical Papyri, vol. 1: Texts, ed. Hans Dieter
Betz, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 94, my emphasis. There is
also a reference to “whirling flame”(which Tavenner [“Fire and Magic,” 31] suggests
to be the least problematic translation of στρόβιλος) in the erotic spell in P. Oslo I.,
333–50: “Whenever I throw thee [myrrh] upon the whirling flame on the bottom
of this bath furnace that thou mayst be burned, thus even shalt thou burn so-and-
so. . . .” This notion of whirling in spells of compulsion also finds parallel in the lit-
erary texts. In Idylls 2.30 (trans. and ed. J. M. Edmonds, The Greek Bucolic Poets,
LCL 28 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912], 29) Theocritus depicts
Simaetha as spinning her rhombus and imploring “as this wheel of brass turns by
grace of Aphrodite, so turn he and turn again before my threshold.”
 CALLON / MIRROR PUNISHMENT    41

instructions on how to perform magical practices that will cause Medea

to fall in love with him:
But the Cyprus-born queen of sharpest arrows bound the dappled wryneck
to the four spokes of the inescapable wheel and brought from Olympus that
bird of madness for the first time to men, and she taught the son of Aison
to be skilful in prayers and charms, so that he might take away Medea’s
respect for her parents, and so that desire for Hellas might set her mind
afire and drive her with the whip of Persuasion.55

Although Faraone argues that the wheel depicted here is stationary, John-
ston rightly asserts that this is an argument from silence.56 Moreover, Fara-
one’s assessment is at odds with other depictions of the magical wheel in
antiquity which frequently refer to its spinning or revolving motion. The
iunx’s connection to spells of compulsion appears also in an anonymous
epigram that dedicates a magic wheel to Aphrodite:
This iunx of Nico, which knows how to draw a man from across the sea
and girls from their bowers, decorated with gold, inset with translucent
amethyst, is dedicated as a dear gift to you, Cyprian, tied through its
middle with a gentle thread of purple wool, a gift of guest-friendship from a
Larissaean witch.57

Faraone suggests that it seems probable that Nico was a successful cour-
tesan, who thus frequently had reason to employ spells of compulsion,
and “who at the end of a long career dedicated this valuable device to
Aphrodite, the patron goddess of her profession.”58
The notion of the magic wheel as used in spells of attraction is per-
haps most prevalent in Theocritus’s Idylls, in which references to it are
frequently (if not to say ritualistically) reiterated. Theocritus depicts
Simaetha’s attempts via magic to reclaim the affection of Delphis, in a
detailed account of the ritual acts and words that constitute this ceremony.
Simaetha remarks that, although she will reproach her lover in person the

55. Pythian 4.214–19 (trans. and ed. William H. Race, Pindar: Olympian Odes.
Pythian Odes, LCL 56 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997], 287).
56. Faraone, “The Wheel, the Whip,” 11–16; Johnston, “Song of the Iynx,” 180
n. 5.
57. Anthologia Graeca 5.205, 1–2 (ed. A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page, The Greek
Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams, vol. 1 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965],
207): Ἴυγξ ἡ Νικοῦς, ἡ καὶ διαπόντιον ἕλκειν ἄνδρα καὶ ἐκ θαλάμων παῖδας ἐπισταμένη,
χρυσῷ ποικιλθεῖσα, διαυγέος ἐξ ἀμεθύστου γλυπτή, σοὶ κεῖται, Κύπρι, φίλον κτέανον,
πορφυρέης ἀμνοῦ μαλακῇ τριχὶ μέσσα δεθεῖσα, τῆς Λαρισσαίης ξείνια φαρμακίδος.
58. Christopher A. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), 152.
42    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

following day, “Now I will bind him with fire magic” (2.9).59 The ritual-
istic actions that she undertakes are followed by the repeated refrain of
“draw to my house my lover, magic wheel” (2.17, 2.22, 2.27, 2.32, 2.37,
2.42, 2.47, 2.52, and 2.57).60 As C. Segal notes, “after the introduction
of the iynx-motif in line 17 there are nine turns of the magical wheel as
Simaetha plies her enchantments.”61
Xenophon also attributes compelling properties to the magic wheel. He
portrays Socrates as conversing with the courtesan Theodote regarding
how to lure friends and lovers to one’s side. He remarks that “I assure
you these things don’t happen without the help of many potions and spells
and magic wheels (ἰύγγων).”62 Theodote responds, “Do lend me your
wheel, that I may turn it first to draw you.”63 As Faraone suggests, “One
gets the feeling that Xenophon and his audience were well acquainted
with these somewhat technical terms for magical techniques and devices
(philtron, epoide, and iunx) and that they would not be at all surprised
to learn that Theodote employs them or that Socrates would humorously
pretend to do so.”64
Several Latin authors connect magic designed to compel with the use of
wheel. For example, in the text briefly noted above, Horace depicts himself
as pleading with Canidia to release him from the spell she has cast upon
him: “All right, all right! I yield to the power of your magic, and I humbly
beseech you. . . . Leave off your awful incantations, Canidia, I beg you, and
let the swift wheel that you have set in motion run back, back (citumque
retro solve, solve turbinem).”65 Propertius depicts the protagonist lament-

59. Trans. Edmonds, 27–31.

60. Although Edmonds translates ἴυγξ here in the sense of the bird which it can
also refer to (“wryneck”; 27–31), the LSJ refers to the iunx mentioned in this passage
as having the connotation of being bound to a wheel: “Used as a charm to recover
unfaithful lovers, being bound to a revolving wheel.” Similarly, Luck, whose transla-
tion is employed here (Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman
Worlds [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985], 68–69), translates
the word as simply “magic wheel.”
61. Segal, “Simaetha and the Iynx (Theocritus Idyll 2),” QUCC 15 (1973): 32–43;
here at 32.
62. Memorabilia 3.11.17 (trans. E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd, Xenophon IV:
Memorabilia. Oeconomicus. Symposium. Apology, LCL 168 [Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1992], 249).
63. Memorabilia 3.11.18 (trans. Marchant and Todd, 249).
64. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, 2.
65. Epodes 17.1–7 (ed. and trans. Niall Rudd, Horace: Odes and Epodes, LCL 33
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004], 313). Lindsay C. Watson, A Com-
mentary on Horace’s Epodes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 546, suggests
that citumque retro solve “combines the ideas of putting the turbo into reverse and
 CALLON / MIRROR PUNISHMENT    43

ing the loss of her lover to a rival: “Not with style but with herbs has that
bitch bested me: he is controlled by the threaded magic wheel (staminea
rhombi ducitur ille rota).”66 Ovid has occasion to discuss witchcraft in
the Amores, attributing his wife’s temptation to become unfaithful to the
interference of a sorceress:
[She is] a certain old dame . . . by the name of Dipsas. . . . She knows the
ways of magic, and Aeaean incantations, and by her art turns back the
liquid waters upon their source; she knows well what the herb can do, what
the thread set in motion by the whirling magic wheel (quid torto concita
rhombo licia), what the poison of the mare in heat.67

In Lucian’s Dialogue of the Courtesans, Bacchis recommends to Melitta

a “most useful witch” whom she had previously employed to facilitate
reconciliation with a lover who had abandoned her. Melitta now faces the
same problem. Bacchis describes the witch’s technique:
She hangs [an object belonging to the victim of the spell, such as clothing
or boots] on a peg and fumigates them with sulphur, sprinkling salt over
the fire, and mumbles both your names. Then she plucks out a magic wheel
(ῥόμβον) from her bosom, and whirls it round, rattling off an incantation
full of horrible outlandish names.68

As Faraone suggests, “Lucian clearly has in mind some kind of ago\ge\

spell that uses fire and the whirling device known as a rhombos.”69 In his
Apology, Apuleius quotes Laevius, listing tools that were depicted as being

so reversing the action of the spell which its revolution produces, and of slackening
(solve) the thread or leash which kept the turbo in motion, that is to say, bringing
it to a stop. The effect of this will be in turn to ‘release’ (solvere) Horace from the
effects of Canidia’s spell.”
66. Elegy 3.6.26 (trans. Vincent Katz, The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius
[Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004], 249). Propertius also refers to the
rhombus at 2.28.B.35 (trans. Katz, 199): “The twisted rhombuses and their magic
incantations have failed” (Deficiunt magico torti sub carmine rhombi). As J.  C.
Yardley, “The Roman Elegists, Sick Girls, and the Soteria,” CJ 27 [1977]: 394–401,
notes, “Propertius is apparently resorting to magic as a cure for Cynthia. However,
H.  J.  Rose has argued that the magic used here always has erotic [or compelling]
purpose and is never associated with healing. He may well be right in his suggestion
that the lines do not belong to the poem” (395 n. 1).
67. Amores 1.8.7 (trans. Grant Showerman, Ovid: Heroides and Amores, LCL 41
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963], 347).
68. Dialogues of the Courtesans 4 (trans. M. D. MacLeod, Lucian VII: Dialogues
of the Dead. Dialogues of the Sea-Gods. Dialogues of the Gods. Dialogues of the
Courtesans, LCL 431 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961], 377–79).
69. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, 151.
44    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

implemented in love magic, among them “the magic wheel” (ung[u]es).70

The magic charge he faces is, of course, having wielded magic against
Pudentilla in order to ensnare her in marriage. The lexicon of Suidas offers
as one of the definitions for this word “a certain instrument called a iunx,
which sorceresses revolve . . . just as they draw their beloved ones.”71 It
also, of course, notes instances where it is employed in literature and
tradition with this same intent, including the statement that Cleopatra
employed such to lure her lovers.
References to the use of a wheel in spells used to compel objects other
than a love interest are also found in antiquity. Martial queries over “who
now will have the skill to draw down the moon with Thessalian wheel
[rhombo],” referring to the commonplace tradition of the Thessalian
witches.72 According to Marinus, the theurgist Proclus had the ability not
only to foresee the future, but also to compel nature. Marinus asserts that
Proclus “actually caused rains by an apposite use of a iunx, releasing Attica
from a baneful drought.”73 Citing Gregory of Nazianzus (or. 4.55), Luck
rightly notes that contemporaneous Christian authors held that “theurgy
was nothing else but magic, and closely aligned with fraud.”74 Augustine
also makes his views on theurgy clear:
[Those who make] an attempt to distinguish [between] two kinds of
magic . . . would have it thought that among those who devote themselves
to these illicit arts, some deserve condemnation—whom the common
people also call warlocks or witches, and these they say are concerned
with witchcraft—while others, to whom they give credit for theurgy, are
praiseworthy. And yet both groups alike are devotees of the fraudulent rites
of demons masquerading under the names of angels.75

Although it is unclear whether Philostratus refers to a wheel when he

speaks of the four iunxes (ἴυγγες) hung from the ceiling of the Babylonian

70. Apologia 30 (trans. H. E. Butler, The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of

Madaura [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909], 63).
71. s.v. ἴυγξ in Lexicographi Graeci, Suidae Lexicon D-Q, ed. Ada Adler (Stutt­
gart: Teubner, 1927), 677–78.
72. Epig. 9.29.9 (ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Martial: Epigrams II:
Books 6–10, LCL 95 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993], 257). See
also Martial, Epig. 12.57.17.
73. Vita Procli 28 (trans. Mark Edwards, Neoplatonic Saints: The Lives of Plotinus
and Proclus by their Students [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000], 101).
74. Luck, “Theurgy,” 188.
75. Civ. diu. 10.9 (trans. David S. Wiesen, Saint Augustine: The City of God Against
the Pagans, vol. III, LCL 413 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968], 287).
For this reference I am again indebted to an anonymous reader from JECS.
 CALLON / MIRROR PUNISHMENT    45

palace by the magi (οἱ μάγοι), and calls them the “tongues of the gods”
(θεῶν γλώττας), Johnston persuasively argues that it is easiest to under-
stand these as golden wheels (rather than golden statues of birds).76 Here
is another connection between wheels (albeit ones that perhaps did not
revolve) and what members of the early Jesus movement would have most
likely denounced as magical practice.77
These examples demonstrate that persons in antiquity would have seen
punishment via a wheel as perfectly appropriate to the charge of sorcery.
Far from being a randomly suggested punishment or a momentary lapse
of logic, the author of the Apoc. Petr. has devised a punishment which
logically corresponds to the offense, just as he has done with many of
the other sin and punishment pairings he depicts. This pairing is a clear
instance of mirror punishment: it was with a wheel that sorcerers (and those
maligned as such) were believed to have cast spells aimed at compelling
their object, thus it is by a wheel that they are punished. The perpetrators
of this sin suffer an affliction similar to that which they were perceived to
have inflicted on their victims,78 the objects of such spells, in accordance
with another aspect of mirror punishment that Wong identifies: “punish-
ment determined according to the motivating force which forms the basis
of the crime.”79 In casting spells designed to compel, the (alleged) sorcerer
sought to undermine, if not obliterate, autonomous movement in the
object of his or her spell and replace it with his or her own will. In turn
the sorcerers on the wheel are similarly invisibly bound and subject to an
external force, incapable of autonomous movement: “hung thereon [the
wheels of fire] by the power of their whirling.” Not only are they punished
by means of the same instrument with which the sin was envisioned to
be undertaken, but they also suffer that which they sought to inflict: two
aspects of the concept of mirror punishment, here overlapping.

76. Vit. Apoll. 1.25 (ed. and trans. Christopher P. Jones, Philostratus I: The Life
of Apollonius of Tyana Books I–IV, LCL 16 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2005], 99). Johnston, “Song,” 184.
77. See, for example, Tertullian’s equation of pagan deities with demons (De Anima.
2.7). Magic, of course, was thought to include the invocation of demons.
78. A point which Buchholz holds to be an important feature in the described pun-
ishments. See, for example, his exegesis on parts of 7 (Your Eyes Will Be Opened,
315, where he notes that murderers “feel pain, just as their victims felt pain”), 9 (Your
Eyes Will Be Opened, 323, where those who betrayed and persecuted God’s righteous
ones are “whipped with every kind of whipping suffered by those persecuted”), and
11 (Your Eyes Will Be Opened, 335, where “the pains which the birds inflict up the
children reflect the pains parents feel when their children are disobedient”).
79. Previously noted above as the third aspect of mirror punishment as described
by Wong.
46    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Even though there may not be much evidence correlating wheels and
sorcery in documentary material, it is clear that this association was wide-
spread among those composing literary texts in antiquity, including the
author of the Apoc. Petr.

HOW MIRROR PUNISHMENT AS THE INTERPRETIVE

LENS STRENGTHENS PREVIOUS SCHOLARSHIP

The principle of mirror punishment not only illumines the connection the
Apoc. Petr. makes between sorcerers and wheels, but it also supports pre-
vious arguments on the pairing of a given sin with a given punishment.
Wong’s tripartite division of the forms of mirror punishment is particu-
larly helpful. It uncovers a consistent logic behind the author’s seemingly
diverse punishments.
The first aspect, that of the limb or body part with which the sin was
committed as undergoing the chief punishment, has previously been identi-
fied by Bauckham: those who blasphemed are suspended by their tongues
(7); women who plaited their hair for the purpose of attracting men in
order to commit adultery are hung by it (7); men who committed adul-
tery are suspended from their genitalia (7);80 those who bore false witness
against the martyrs bringing about their deaths have their lips cut off and
are inflicted with fire in their mouths and intestines (9);81 women who
have lost their virginity prior to marriage have their flesh torn (11).82 As
noted above, the punishment of slaves for talking back (the chewing of
the tongue) is also a punishment of the body part that was used in com-
mitting the sin.
If we take the symbolic quality of mirror punishment into consider-
ation, we can add the blasphemers and betrayers of righteousness to this
group (9). These are punished by chewing their own tongues as well as
having their eyes burned out. As Buchholz suggests, “their blasphemy
is punished with perpetual gnawing of their own tongue, and their eyes
burnt out probably because they were unable to see the true way.”83 So
too can be added the punishment of those who claim to be righteous but

80. On thigh as a euphemism for such, see n. 22 above.

81. Bauckham, Fate of the Dead, 217, suggests that the intestines are involved
presumably because “the deceit comes from within the liar.”
82. On the correlation between these two components, see n. 26 above. It should be
noted that Bauckham, Fate of the Dead, 215, 217, designates these first three ­pairings
as falling under the category of hanging punishments, thus somewhat ­distinct from
the latter two. On hanging punishments, see Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell, 82–92.
83. Buchholz, Your Eyes Will Be Opened, 323.
 CALLON / MIRROR PUNISHMENT    47

do not actually seek righteousness, who are described as both blind and
mute (12). As Buchholz suggests, “their blindness and lack of speech and
hearing illustrates their failure to sense [or see] justice or to speak out for
it.”84 Thus, understanding mirror punishment—with its symbolic compo-
nent—as the logical schema the author of the Apoc. Petr. was employing
strengthens previous identifications made between these sin and punish-
ment pairings in a way that the lex talionis cannot, given that all of these
seem excessively severe punitive measures.
The second component, that of the instrument which was used to commit
the sin functioning as the means by which the sinner is punished (as was
shown to be the case sorcerers punished by wheels), also lends support to
previous scholarship on other sin and punishment pairings. Patrick Gray’s
tentatively posited explanations regarding the punishments for women
who have terminated their pregnancies are strengthened when backed
by the model of this second aspect of mirror punishment. Gray speaks of
a loosely defined “poetic justice of a sort” (which is, as Miller argues, a
prominent aspect of mirror punishment) in describing the logic behind the
punishments of these women (8).85 The Apoc. Petr. depicts them as being
submerged up to their necks in a “flow.” Gray incorporates Buchholz’s
assertion that the original Ethiopic noun for this word can denote any
bodily discharge, such as menstruation or excrement, yet in this context
most likely refers to the terminated foetus and related matter.86 Gray sug-
gests that certain abortive measures in antiquity which were undertaken
by soaking in certain types of baths would also logically correspond with
this punishment.87 These baths were held to bring about the sort of flow
described by the Apoc. Petr., and this flow itself was the termination of
the pregnancy.88 Gray’s tentative explanation for the linking of the pur-
ported sin and its punishment becomes more persuasive under this aspect

84. Buchholz, Your Eyes Will Be Opened, 337. Similarly, Himmelfarb, Tours of
Hell, 105, suggests that blindness is “the physical actualization of the lack of self-
awareness or self-criticism that allows the sins to come into being . . . blameworthy
ignorance is crystallized into physical blindness.”
85. Gray, “Abortion,” 320.
86. Gray, “Abortion,” 320; Buchholz, Your Eyes Will Be Opened, 316–17; see
also PGM 62.76–106 in Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri.
87. Gray, “Abortion,” 320 n. 29, citing the recommendations for such baths in
Soranus, Gynecology, 1.64–65.
88. See, for example Soranus, Gynecology 1.64 (trans. Owsei Temkin, Soranus’s
Gynecology [Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956], 66), who
recommends that a woman wishing to terminate her pregnancy should “use diuretic
decoctions which also have the power to bring on menstruation, and empty and purge
the abdomen with relatively pungent clysters.”
48    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

of ­mirror punishment. The women are punished by the implements they

used in committing the perceived sin of terminating a pregnancy: the abor-
tive bath, believed to instigate this flow which was the termination of the
pregnancy, and the subsequent flow itself.89 Moreover, Gray remarks that
the flashes of lightning that strike (or drill, on Buchholz’s translation,
which Gray also notes)90 into the eyes of these same women “remain
unexplained according to the lex talionis.”91 He notes, however, that a
possible correlation between these components can be found in the phe-
nomenon of extracting a foetus from the womb with a metal hook which
was inserted into its ear or eye socket.92 In view of this second aspect of
mirror punishment, Gray’s tentative suggestion gains further support: the
means of the perpetration of the purported sin becomes that by which the
purported sinner is punished.
The concept of mirror punishment also supports Gray’s suggestion
regarding the punishment of lactating women who have exposed their
infants (8), although he argues that the principle at work is the lex ­talionis.93
Gray notes that “animals are formed from this ‘wasted’ milk, contrary
to the normal course of nature, to become instruments of [the women’s]
destruction.”94 He further notes that exposed infants must have been vul-
nerable to wild animals, citing Pseudo-Phocylides who assumes this to be
the case: “Do not let a woman destroy the unborn babe in her belly, nor
after its birth throw it before the dogs and vultures as prey.”95 As Gray
himself suggests, these women are punished with what the author envi-
sions them to have employed in bringing about the death of their children:
predatory animals. Again the instrument with which the sin was commit-
ted becomes the instrument by which one is punished. We have already
noted that the mirror punishment principle is at work behind both men and
women who have exposed their children as having to stand naked (8).96

89. Gray, “Abortion,” 320, also suggests a correlation between “this flow possibly
containing excrement and the dung hill on which infants were sometimes exposed.”
While this is a logical correlation, the purported sin being punished in this instance
is abortion, rather than exposure (which has its own punishment at 8.5–10, and is
discussed above). Thus, Buchholz’s suggestion that this flow likely consists of repro-
ductive materials seems to be the best understanding.
90. Gray, “Abortion,” 320; Buchholz, Your Eyes Will Be Opened, 205, 318, who
states that in the Ethiopic “drill/borer” is the clear reading of the text.
91. Gray, “Abortion,” 320.
92. Gray, “Abortion,” 320, citing as evidence Celsus, Medicus 7.29.
93. Gray, “Abortion,” 324.
94. Gray, “Abortion,” 320.
95. Pseudo-Phocylides 184–85, in Gray, “Abortion,” 324–25.
96. See n. 23.
 CALLON / MIRROR PUNISHMENT    49

Similarly, the depiction of those who have persecuted and betrayed

the righteous as being punished by being whipped (9) is best understood
under the principle of mirror punishment. As Buchholz remarks, “They are
whipped with every kind of whipping suffered by those they persecuted.”97
That martyrs were indeed whipped finds support in The Martyrdom of
Polycarp.98 As such, these persecutors and betrayers are punished with
the same instrument that they used—or set in motion to be used—in the
sin they are described as having committed.

CONCLUSIONS

Mirror punishment provides a logic for the Apoc. Petr.’s seemingly illogi-
cal connection between the sin of sorcery and its punishment as well as
for other sin and punishment pairings. Moreover, it reconciles well with
the text’s own stipulations that a sinner will be punished “according to his
work.” Identifying the logical correlation which would have been known
in antiquity between perceived sorcerers and wheels strengthens the view
that the author of the Apoc. Petr. had a particular logical schema in mind,
and composed his text accordingly. While of course there are still several
pairings where the underlying logic of what links them remains opaque,99
perhaps with the more encompassing concept of mirror punishment in
view, future scholarship can help shed light on these (thus far) puzzling
connections.

Callie Callon is a Ph.D. student at the Center for the

Study of Religion at the University of Toronto

97. Buchholz, Your Eyes Will Be Opened, 323.

98. “For who would not admire [the martyrs’] nobility, endurance, and love of
the Master? For they endured even when their skin was ripped to shreds by whips,
revealing the very anatomy of their flesh, down to the inner veins and arteries, while
bystanders felt pity and wailed” (Martyrdom of Polycarp, 2.2; ed. and trans. Bart D.
Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers. Vol. I, LCL 24 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003], 369, my emphasis).
99. Frequently mentioned in this category are those who have denied righteous-
ness (7), murderers and those who aligned themselves with them (7), usurers (10),
idol worshippers (10), those who have not honored their parents but instead have
withdrawn from them (11), and those that “have confidence in their sins, are not
obedient to their parents, and do not follow the instruction of their fathers and do
not honour those who are older than they” (11 [Schneemelcher 632]).
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